Bitcoin is a digital currency, sometimes referred to as a cryptocurrency, best known as the world's first truly decentralized digital currency. Bitcoin is traded on a peer-to-peer basis with a distributed ledger called the Blockchain, and the Bitcoin exchange rate to the US Dollar and other major currencies is determined by supply and demand as with other global exchange rates. The traded value of Bitcoin has proven volatile through various booms and busts in demand. Ultimately, however, many see Bitcoin as a store of value against government-backed fiat currencies.

Bloomberg reported that the largest 17 crypto merchant-processing services handled $69 million in June 2018, down from $411 million in September 2017. Bitcoin is "not actually usable" for retail transactions because of high costs and the inability to process chargebacks, according to Nicholas Weaver, a researcher quoted by Bloomberg. High price volatility and transaction fees make paying for small retail purchases with bitcoin impractical, according to economist Kim Grauer. However, bitcoin continues to be used for large-item purchases on sites such as Overstock.com, and for cross-border payments to freelancers and other vendors.[141]

In October 2015,[63] a development governance was proposed as Ethereum Improvement Proposal, aka EIP, standardized on EIP-1.[64] The core development group and community were to gain consensus by a process regulated EIP. A few notable decisions were made in the process of EIP, such as EIP-160 (EXP cost increase caused by Spurious Dragon Hardfork)[65] and EIP-20 (ERC-20 Token Standard).[66] In January 2018, the EIP process was finalized and published as EIP-1 status turned "active".[63]
^ "Crib Sheet: Neptune's Brood – Charlie's Diary". www.antipope.org. Archived from the original on 14 June 2017. Retrieved 5 December 2017. I wrote Neptune's Brood in 2011. Bitcoin was obscure back then, and I figured had just enough name recognition to be a useful term for an interstellar currency: it'd clue people in that it was a networked digital currency. Physical wallets can also take the form of metal token coins[102] with a private key accessible under a security hologram in a recess struck on the reverse side.[103]:38 The security hologram self-destructs when removed from the token, showing that the private key has been accessed.[104] Originally, these tokens were struck in brass and other base metals, but later used precious metals as bitcoin grew in value and popularity.[103]:80 Coins with stored face value as high as ₿1000 have been struck in gold.[103]:102–104 The British Museum's coin collection includes four specimens from the earliest series[103]:83 of funded bitcoin tokens; one is currently on display in the museum's money gallery.[105] In 2013, a Utahn manufacturer of these tokens was ordered by the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) to register as a money services business before producing any more funded bitcoin tokens.[102][103]:80 Ethereum is the pioneer for blockchain based smart contracts. When running on the blockchain a smart contract becomes like a self-operating computer program that automatically executes when specific conditions are met. On the blockchain, smart contracts allow for code to be run exactly as programmed without any possibility of downtime, censorship, fraud or third-party interference. It can facilitate the exchange of money, content, property, shares, or anything of value. The Ethereum network went live on July 30th, 2015 with 72 million Ethereum premined.
Despite bringing a number of benefits, decentralized applications aren’t faultless. Because smart contract code is written by humans, smart contracts are only as good as the people who write them. Code bugs or oversights can lead to unintended adverse actions being taken. If a mistake in the code gets exploited, there is no efficient way in which an attack or exploitation can be stopped other than obtaining a network consensus and rewriting the underlying code. This goes against the essence of the blockchain which is meant to be immutable. Also, any action taken by a central party raises serious questions about the decentralized nature of an application.
Ethereum's blockchain uses Merkle trees, for security reasons, to improve scalability, and to optimize transaction hashing.[61] As with any Merkle tree implementation, it allows for storage savings, set membership proofs (called "Merkle proofs"), and light client synchronization. The Ethereum network has at times faced congestion problems, for example, congestion occurred during late 2017 in relation to Cryptokitties.[62]
Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, the founders of the Gemini Trust Co. exchange, reported that they had cut their paper wallets into pieces and stored them in envelopes distributed to safe deposit boxes across the United States.[101] Through this system, the theft of one envelope would neither allow the thief to steal any bitcoins nor deprive the rightful owners of their access to them.[100] The successful miner finding the new block is allowed by the rest of the network to reward themselves with newly created bitcoins and transaction fees.[88] As of 9 July 2016,[89] the reward amounted to 12.5 newly created bitcoins per block added to the blockchain, plus any transaction fees from payments processed by the block. To claim the reward, a special transaction called a coinbase is included with the processed payments.[7]:ch. 8 All bitcoins in existence have been created in such coinbase transactions. The bitcoin protocol specifies that the reward for adding a block will be halved every 210,000 blocks (approximately every four years). Eventually, the reward will decrease to zero, and the limit of 21 million bitcoins[f] will be reached c. 2140; the record keeping will then be rewarded solely by transaction fees.[90]
In Charles Stross' 2013 science fiction novel, Neptune's Brood, the universal interstellar payment system is known as "bitcoin" and operates using cryptography.[227] Stross later blogged that the reference was intentional, saying "I wrote Neptune's Brood in 2011. Bitcoin was obscure back then, and I figured had just enough name recognition to be a useful term for an interstellar currency: it'd clue people in that it was a networked digital currency."[228] We are always looking for feedback on the platform and user suggestions are regularly included in future releases of this price tracking software. The website is currently undergoing development to include price data from all ERC20 tokens as well order book data, blockchain usage data and more. We endeavour to keep the site simple to use with clear data visualizations that help investors stay abreast of the latest Ethereum price movements. We are determined to keep this webapp free from intrusive advertising; please share this website and its content!
EthereumPrice.org was developed by Ether0x in March 2016 to allow users to easily track the price of Ethereum both historically and in real-time. The platform has since evolved to include several fiat currencies (EUR, GBP, JPY and others) as well as price data for a number of Ethereum ERC20 tokens and other blockchain currencies. More recently, prediction data from Augur was also added to provide insight into the future price expectations of the Ether market. Price data is currently sourced from multiple exchanges with the weighted average price of these assets being calculated by CryptoCompare.com. For more details on the weighted average calculation, see our FAQ. The price of bitcoins has gone through cycles of appreciation and depreciation referred to by some as bubbles and busts.[159] In 2011, the value of one bitcoin rapidly rose from about US$0.30 to US$32 before returning to US$2.[160] In the latter half of 2012 and during the 2012–13 Cypriot financial crisis, the bitcoin price began to rise,[161] reaching a high of US$266 on 10 April 2013, before crashing to around US$50. On 29 November 2013, the cost of one bitcoin rose to a peak of US$1,242.[162] In 2014, the price fell sharply, and as of April remained depressed at little more than half 2013 prices. As of August 2014 it was under US$600.[163] During their time as bitcoin developers, Gavin Andresen[164] and Mike Hearn[165] warned that bubbles may occur. Any services that are centralized can be decentralized using Ethereum. Think about all the intermediary services that exist across hundreds of different industries. From obvious services like loans provided by banks to intermediary services rarely thought about by most people like title registries, voting systems, regulatory compliance and much more.
رغم وجود مجموعة محدودة نسبيا من المواقع التي تقبل دفعات بيتكوين لقاء منتجاتها، مقارنةً بالمواقع التي تتعامل بالعملات التقليدية، فإن بيتكوين مدعومة من مجموعة متزايدة من المواقع، من بينها شركات ومواقع كبيرة ومتنوعة، مثل مواقع بيع خدمات الاستضافة وحجز أسماء النطاق والشبكات الاجتماعية ومواقع الفيديو والموسيقى والمواقع المتنوعة التي تبيع مختلف أنواع المنتجات. J. P. Morgan Chase is developing JPM Coin on a permissioned-variant of Ethereum blockchain dubbed "Quorum".[53] It's designed to toe the line between private and public in the realm of shuffling derivatives and payments. The idea is to satisfy regulators who need seamless access to financial goings-on, while protecting the privacy of parties that don't wish to reveal their identities nor the details of their transactions to the general public.[54]

In Ethereum all smart contracts are stored publicly on every node of the blockchain, which has costs.[57] Being a blockchain means it is secure by design and is an example of a distributed computing system with high Byzantine fault tolerance. The downside is that performance issues arise in that every node is calculating all the smart contracts in real time, resulting in lower speeds.[57] As of January 2016, the Ethereum protocol could process about 25 transactions per second.[57] In comparison, the Visa payment platform processes 45,000 payments per second leading some to question the scalability of Ethereum.[58] On 19 December 2016, Ethereum exceeded one million transactions in a single day for the first time.[59]
As the industry continues to investigate blockchain platforms, it’s apparent that Ethereum is becoming a de facto leader. For example, a few days ago JPMorgan publicly open-sourced its Quorum platform, architected and developed around the Go Ethereum client by Jeff Wilcke and his team. Several other major banks are using Ethereum, and Microsoft is anchoring its Bletchley platform on it as the foundational blockchain element. Industry, both publicly and confidentially, continues to contribute to Ethereum and work with us and others to help our promising, toddler-age codebase reach maturity. Stay tuned for news on this front. Ethereum-based customized software and networks, independent from the public Ethereum chain, are being tested by enterprise software companies.[48] Interested parties include Microsoft, IBM, JPMorgan Chase,[33][49] Deloitte,[50] R3,[51] Innovate UK (cross-border payments prototype).[52] Barclays, UBS and Credit Suisse are experimenting with Ethereum blockchain to automate Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) II requirements.

Until relatively recently, building blockchain applications has required a complex background in coding, cryptography, mathematics as well as significant resources. But times have changed. Previously unimagined applications, from electronic voting & digitally recorded property assets to regulatory compliance & trading are now actively being developed and deployed faster than ever before. By providing developers with the tools to build decentralized applications, Ethereum is making all of this possible.

The price of bitcoins has gone through cycles of appreciation and depreciation referred to by some as bubbles and busts.[159] In 2011, the value of one bitcoin rapidly rose from about US$0.30 to US$32 before returning to US$2.[160] In the latter half of 2012 and during the 2012–13 Cypriot financial crisis, the bitcoin price began to rise,[161] reaching a high of US$266 on 10 April 2013, before crashing to around US$50. On 29 November 2013, the cost of one bitcoin rose to a peak of US$1,242.[162] In 2014, the price fell sharply, and as of April remained depressed at little more than half 2013 prices. As of August 2014 it was under US$600.[163] During their time as bitcoin developers, Gavin Andresen[164] and Mike Hearn[165] warned that bubbles may occur.
The proof-of-work system, alongside the chaining of blocks, makes modifications of the blockchain extremely hard, as an attacker must modify all subsequent blocks in order for the modifications of one block to be accepted.[87] As new blocks are mined all the time, the difficulty of modifying a block increases as time passes and the number of subsequent blocks (also called confirmations of the given block) increases.[75]

The first wallet program, simply named Bitcoin, and sometimes referred to as the Satoshi client, was released in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto as open-source software.[11] In version 0.5 the client moved from the wxWidgets user interface toolkit to Qt, and the whole bundle was referred to as Bitcoin-Qt.[107] After the release of version 0.9, the software bundle was renamed Bitcoin Core to distinguish itself from the underlying network.[108][109]

The domain name "bitcoin.org" was registered on 18 August 2008.[17] On 31 October 2008, a link to a paper authored by Satoshi Nakamoto titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System[4] was posted to a cryptography mailing list.[18] Nakamoto implemented the bitcoin software as open-source code and released it in January 2009.[19][20][11] Nakamoto's identity remains unknown.[10]
To lower the costs, bitcoin miners have set up in places like Iceland where geothermal energy is cheap and cooling Arctic air is free.[205] Bitcoin miners are known to use hydroelectric power in Tibet, Quebec, Washington (state), and Austria to reduce electricity costs.[204][206] Miners are attracted to suppliers such as Hydro Quebec that have energy surpluses.[207] According to a University of Cambridge study, much of bitcoin mining is done in China, where electricity is subsidized by the government.[208][209]

Despite the fallout from The DAO hack, Ethereum is moving forward and looking to a bright future. By providing a user-friendly platform that enables people to harness the power of blockchain technology, Ethereum is speeding up the decentralization of the world economy. Decentralized applications have the potential to profoundly disrupt hundreds of industries including finance, real estate, academia, insurance, healthcare and the public sector amongst many others.

Ethereum was initially described in a white paper by Vitalik Buterin,[10] a programmer involved with Bitcoin Magazine, in late 2013 with a goal of building decentralized applications.[11][12] Buterin had argued that Bitcoin needed a scripting language for application development. Failing to gain agreement, he proposed development of a new platform with a more general scripting language.[4]:88

Lightweight clients consult full clients to send and receive transactions without requiring a local copy of the entire blockchain (see simplified payment verification – SPV). This makes lightweight clients much faster to set up and allows them to be used on low-power, low-bandwidth devices such as smartphones. When using a lightweight wallet, however, the user must trust the server to a certain degree, as it can report faulty values back to the user. Lightweight clients follow the longest blockchain and do not ensure it is valid, requiring trust in miners.[96] J. P. Morgan Chase is developing JPM Coin on a permissioned-variant of Ethereum blockchain dubbed "Quorum".[53] It's designed to toe the line between private and public in the realm of shuffling derivatives and payments. The idea is to satisfy regulators who need seamless access to financial goings-on, while protecting the privacy of parties that don't wish to reveal their identities nor the details of their transactions to the general public.[54] This dramatic volatility attracted global attention with the mainstream media running near-daily reports on the price of Ether. The publicity generated has been a major boon for the ecosystem, attracting thousands of new developers and business ventures alike. In 2018 the amount raised through Ethereum-enabled ICOs reached almost $8bn, increasing from just $90m in 2016. While the price of Ethereum has faced extreme volatility over the years, it is this volatility which has driven interest. After every boom and bust cycle, Ethereum comes out the other side with a fundamentally stronger platform and a broader developer community backing it. These fundamental improvements would suggest a positive long-term outlook on the price of Ethereum.